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Both Ends Burning Mission

The mission of Both Ends Burning is to bring more orphaned and abandoned children into families where they are loved, cared for, and encouraged to reach their full potential.

The campaign strives to persuade the world that intercountry adoption works, and is a beneficial option for the welfare and development of children. For many children, those without biological parents or extended family, it is the best option.

While intercountry adoption is favored by a great majority of Americans, the numbers are in sharp decline. This in part because it has become too expensive and too bureaucratic for most families, and in part because a handful of organizations are maligning adoption as a last resort. The resort for children is being consigned to living out their childhood years in an institutional setting, or, even worse, in homelessness.

Organizations working to stop or slow international adoption should know they are condemning millions of innocent children to desperate circumstances: squalid living in substandard institutions or camps, situations that stunt their emotional and intellectual growth and expose them to higher risk of disease and death, or a life on the streets where they are in danger of being sold into slavery.

It is counterintuitive to propose shutting down intercountry adoption in order to "protect" children from child trafficking. Homeless orphans and children living in questionable institutions are at far greater risk of child trafficking than children who are adopted.

Both Ends Burning fully supports earnest efforts to reunite children with their families of origin. It also endorses efforts to find adoptive families in country, but in much of the Fourth World, that alternative is not a realistic one.

For children waiting for adoption, we are working to streamline the current process and make faster, cheaper, and less bureaucratic. The earlier a child can be adopted into a loving home, the sooner that child can go forward and have the healthy, happy, productive life every child deserves. The longer they wait unnecessarily, the greater the risk of their leading underdeveloped, unrealized lives amid dangers no child should have to endure.

Both Ends Burning's plans for reform will more reliably assure the worthiness of families who apply to adopt a child. Our hub system will reduce incidences of child trafficking and other abuses.

Join our campaign and become part of this international effort to improve the lives of orphans.